To spot a casting scam, actors should be aware of a few common red flags: odd spellings or incorrect grammar, email addresses written out with parentheses or special characters, and offers to pay you in advance. Below, we’ve listed out some of the most common signs of a scammer casting notice:

Bad grammar: The majority of casting scams are from foreign individuals with a limited command of English and entertainment-industry terminology. These scammers may also use nonsensical job titles and obviously fake names (e.g., “Jimmy Freelancer”), etc.

Strange email addresses: It’s also common for scammers to write out their email addresses in odd ways, using spaces, parentheses, brackets, or other special characters. For instance, they might format their email address like casting [@] example [dot] com. Beware of any casting calls using that technique.

Prepayment: No legitimate project will offer to pay you upfront before you’ve actually done any work for them. Scammers, however, will frequently offer to pay upfront—although you’ll never get any real money from them—or try and trick you into revealing your banking details.

Casting without an audition: Although some real projects will also cast actors online without meeting them first, it’s more common among scammers to claim they want to hire you without even meeting you first.

No locations: Casting scams will often say they’re “shooting near you” without being specific about the state where the project is taking place. Or they’ll even change the state to match your location if you tell them that you’ve moved.

Unexpected fees: If an opportunity requires any sort of legitimate payment from you to participate (e.g., a membership fee to join a community theater or an entry fee to enter a talent competition), then the fee requirements should be clearly spelled out in their original listing. If the producers surprise you with fees (or other dubious obligations) that weren’t mentioned in the original casting call, then be wary. This could be a case of a pay-to-play or bait-and-switch scam, and should be reported to Backstage immediately.